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The CIA Wants To Know How To Control the Climate
Taco Cowboy writes " The CIA is currently funding, in part, a $630,000 study on geoengineering, the science of using experimental techniques to modify Earth's climate. Scientists will study how humans might influence weather patterns, assess the potential dangers of messing with the climate, and investigate possible national security implications of geoengineering attempts. The study calls for information on two geoengineering techniques in particular, 'solar radiation management (SRM),' which refers to launching material into Earth's atmosphere to try and block the Sun's infrared radiation, limiting global temperature rise; and 'carbon dioxide removal (CDR),' taking carbon dioxide emissions out of the climate, which scientists have proposed doing through a variety of means, from structures that eat air pollution to capturing carbon emissions as they come out of smokestacks."
Hmm.
That seems to completely miss the point. The CIA doesn't give a shit about "climate change" or whatever we're calling it this week. They care about ability to and implications of controlling and weaponizing weather. Some asian country giving the USA shit? Send a hurricane their way. Some south american country not playing along with US policy or making us look bad? Cause an earthquake. Want to bolster US corn syrup? Cause an extensive drought in sugar producing regions of other nations.
The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.
- Develop cold fusion.
- Replace polluting energy sources by unlimited fusion energy.
- Use unlimited energy to reverse the polluting mechanisms (carbon scrubbing).
Some times I wonder how bad is the player that's managing Humans in the intergalactic strategy game. Somewhere there's a civilization that made a fusion rush and are now conquering their galaxy.
Maybe we're the AI set to Dumb.
Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.
Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.
I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.